'African American history' is the portion of
American history that specifically discusses the
African American or Black American ethnic group in the
United States. Most African Americans are the descendants of
African
slaves held in the United States from 1619 to 1865. Other African Americans are voluntary immigrants from Africa,
South America, and the
Caribbean. African American history is celebrated in the United States during
Black History Month.
African Origins
The
Portuguese brought the first slaves out of
Africa in 1442. As the export of slaves grew, eight distinct slave-trading regions developed in Africa:
West Central Africa,
Bight of Benin,
Bight of Biafra,
Gold Coast,
Senegambia,
South East Africa,
Upper Guinea, and
Windward Coast. West Central Africa being the largest source.
[1] The American slave population was made up of the various ethnic groups from these regions including the
Bakongo,
Mbundu,
Yoruba,
Fon,
Nupe,
Ibo,
Wolof,
Fulbe, and
Serer amongst others. Once mixed together in the Americas, these different peoples began to forge a new history and culture based on their similarities.
[2]
Introduction of Slavery
Main articles: History of slavery in the United States
The first African slaves were brought to
Jamestown in 1619. The
English settlers treated these captives as
indentured servants and released them after a number of years. This practice was gradually replaced by the system of race based slavery used in the
Caribbean.
[3] As servants were freed they became competition for resources. Additionally, released servants had to be replaced. This, combined with the still ambiguous nature of the social status of Blacks and the difficulty in using any other group of people as forced servants, led to the relegation of Blacks into slavery.
Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery in 1641. Other colonies followed suit by passing laws that passed slavery on to the children of slaves and making non-Christian imported servants slaves for life.
[4]
A former slave displays the telltale criss-cross,
keloid scars from being
bullwhipped.
The Revolution and Early America
The latter half of the 18th century was a time of political upheaval in the United States. In the midst of cries for relief from
British tyranny and oppression, several people pointed out the apparent hypocrisies of slave holders demanding freedom. The
Declaration of Independence, a document that would become a
manifesto for human rights and personal freedom, was written by
Thomas Jefferson who owned over 200 slaves. The
Second Continental Congress did consider freeing slaves to disrupt British commerce. They also removed language from the Declaration of Independence that included the promotion of slavery amongst the offenses of
King George III. A number of free Blacks, most notably
Prince Hall—the founder of
Prince Hall Freemasonry, submitted
petitions for the end of slavery. But these petitions were largely ignored.
[5]
This did not deter Blacks, free and slave, from participating in the revolution.
Crispus Attucks, a free Black tradesman, was the first casualty of the
Boston Massacre and of the ensuing
American Revolutionary War. 5,000 Blacks, including Prince Hall, fought in the
Continental Army. Many side by side with
White soldiers at the
battles of Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill. But when
George Washington took command in 1775 he barred any further recruitment of Blacks. Alternatively, the
Loyalists offered emancipation to any slave owned by a
Patriot who was willing to join the Loyalist forces.
Lord Dunmore, the
Governor of
Virginia, recruited 300 Black men into his
Ethiopian regiment within a month of making this proclamation. Well known
Black Loyalist soldiers include
Colonel Tye and
Boston King. The Americans eventually won the war and in the provisional treaty they demanded the return of property, including slaves. 3,000 to 4,000 documented Black loyalists were able to leave the country for
Nova Scotia,
Jamaica, and Britain rather than be returned to slavery.
[6]
The
Constitutional Convention of 1787 sought to define the foundation for the government of the newly formed United States of America. The
constitution set forth the ideals of freedom and equality while providing for the continuation of the institution of slavery through the and the
three-fifths compromise. Additionally, free blacks rights were also restricted in many places. Most were denied the right to vote and were excluded from public schools. Some Blacks sought to fight these contradictions in court. In 1790,
Elizabeth Freeman and
Quock Walker used language from the new
Massachusetts constitution that declared all men were born free and equal to successfully sue for freedom. A free Black businessman in Boston named
Paul Cuffe sought to be excused from paying taxes since he had no voting rights.
[7]
In the Northern states the revolutionary spirit did help African-Americans. Beginning in the 1750s, there was widespread sentiment during the American Revolution that slavery was a social evil (for the country as a whole and for the whites) that should eventually be abolished. All the Northern states passed emancipation acts between 1780 and 1804; most of these arranged for gradual emancipation and a special status for freedmen, so there were still a dozen "permanent apprentices" in New Jersey in 1860. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 declared all men "born free and equal"; the slave Quork Walker sued for his freedom on this basis and won his freedom, thus abolishing slavery in Massachusetts.
There were more than 59,000 free Blacks in the United States in 1790. By 1810, that number had risen to 186,446. Among the successful was
Benjamin Banneker, a distinguished scientist, almanac writer, and surveyor, who was instrumental in the design and construction of
Washington DC. Despite the challenges of living in the new country most free Blacks fared far better than the nearly 800,000 enslaved Blacks. Even so, many considered
emigrating to
Africa.
The Antebellum Period
As the United States grew, the institution of slavery became more entrenched in the
southern states and northern states began to abolish it.
Pennsylvania was the first with a gradual abolition act passed in 1780. A number of events continued to shape views on slavery. The invention of the
cotton gin in 1793 triggered a 70% increase in the number of slaves in the United States in only 20 years. In 1808,
congress abolished the international slave trade. While American Blacks celebrated this as a victory in the fight against slavery, it served to further increase the demand for slaves. The
Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 allowed any Black person to be claimed as a runaway unless a White person testified on their behalf. A number of free Blacks, especially
indentured children, were
kidnapped and sold into slavery with little or no hope of rescue. By 1819 there were exactly 11 free and 11 slave states, increasing
sectionalism and fears of an imbalance in Congress led to the 1820
Missouri Compromise requiring states to be admitted to the union in pairs, one slave and one free.
[8]
The Black Community
The number of free Blacks grew during this time as well. By 1830 there were 319,000 free Blacks in the United States. 150,000 lived in the northern states. While the majority of free blacks lived in
poverty, some were able to establish successful businesses that catered to the Black community.
Racial discrimination often meant that Blacks weren't welcome or would be mistreated in White businesses and other establishments. To counter this, Blacks developed their own communities with Black owned businesses. Black doctors, lawyers and other businessmen were the foundation of the Black
middle class.
[9] A number of Black organizations were created to help strengthen the Black community and continue the fight against slavery. One of theses was the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, founded in 1830. These organizations amongst other things provided social aid to poor blacks and organized responses to political issues. The Black community also established schools for Black children, since they were often barred from entering public schools.
[10] Further supporting the growth of the Black Community was the
Black church. Starting in the early 1790s with the
AME,
AME Zion and other churches, the Black church grew to be the focal point of the Black community. As with most aspects of the Black community, the Black church was born out of the racial discrimination found in White churches. At first, Black preachers formed separate congregations within the existing
denominations but the discrimination at the higher levels of the church hierarchy encouraged the founding of separate Black denominations.
[11]
The Dred Scott Decision
Main articles: Dred Scott v. Sanford
The American Civil War
Emancipation and Reconstruction
In
1863, during the
American Civil War (
1861–
1865), President
Abraham Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the southern states at war with the North. The
13th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in
1865, outlawed
slavery in the United States. In
1868, the
14th amendment granted full U.S. citizenship to African-Americans. The
15th amendment, ratified in
1870, extended the right to vote to black males.
The Emancipation Proclamation
After the Union victory over the Confederacy, a brief period of southern black progress, called Reconstruction, followed. From 1865 to 1877, under protection of Union troops, some strides were made toward equal rights for African-Americans. Southern blacks began to vote, were elected to the
United States Congress, held local public office, established schools and built towns and businesses.
The aftermath of the Civil War accelerated the process of national African-American
identity formation. Tens of thousands of Black northerners left homes and careers and also migrated to the defeated South, building schools, printing newspapers, and opening businesses. As Joel Williamson puts it:
Many of the migrants, women as well as men, came as teachers sponsored by a dozen or so benevolent societies, arriving in the still turbulent wake of Union armies. Others came to organize relief for the refugees.... Still others... came south as religious missionaries... Some came south as business or professional people seeking opportunity on this... special black frontier. Finally, thousands came as soldiers, and when the war was over, many of [their] young men remained there or returned after a stay of some months in the North to complete their education.
The Rise of Jim Crow
In the face of mounting violence and intimidation directed at blacks as well as whites sympathetic to their cause, the U.S. government retreated from its pledge to guarantee constitutional protections to freedmen and women. When
President Hayes withdrew Union troops from the South in
1877, white southerners acted quickly to reverse the groundbreaking advances of Reconstruction, and
European American mob violence against African Americans intensified. Many blacks were fearful of this trend, and men like
Benjamin "Pap" Singleton began speaking of separating from the South. This idea culminated in the
1879-
1880 movement of the
Exodusters.
Sign for "Colored waiting room",
Georgia, 1943
Seeking to return blacks to their subordinate status under slavery,
white supremacists resurrected ''de facto'' barriers and enacted new laws to further marginalize blacks in southern society, limiting, among other things, black access to transportation, schools, restaurants and other public facilities. White supremacists also promoted the idea that black's participation in government in the south was ended due to incompetence; this view was disseminated in school textbooks and movies such as ''
The Birth of a Nation'' in
1915. Although slavery had been abolished, most southern blacks for decades continued to struggle in grinding poverty as agricultural, domestic and menial laborers. Many were
sharecroppers, their economic status little changed by emancipation.
Racial Terrorism
After its founding in 1867, the
Ku Klux Klan, a clandestine organization sworn to perpetuate white supremacy, became a power in the South and beyond, eventually establishing a northern headquarters in
Greenfield, Indiana. The Klan employed
lynching, cross burnings and other forms of
terrorism, violence and intimidation.
The
Jim Crow era saw the cruelest wave of "racial" hatred that America has yet experienced. Between 1890 and 1940, millions of African Americans were disenfranchised, killed, brutalized, even discouraged from learning the ''
Three Rs''. According to newspaper records kept at the
Tuskegee Institute, about 5,000 men, women, and children were murdered outright by the system, tortured to death in documented extrajudicial public rituals—human sacrifices called "
lynchings." Public murders not reported by the newspapers plus similar executions under the veneer of due process were estimated by
Ida B. Wells to have added up to about 20,000 killings. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers during this period, it is reported that less than 50 whites were ever indicted for their crimes, and only four sentenced. Meanwhile, the lynchings were a weapon of terror with millions of Afro-Americans living in a constant state of anxiety and fear of the white mob.
[12]
Civil Rights
In response to these and other setbacks, in the summer of
1905,
W.E.B. DuBois and 28 other prominent, African-American men met secretly at
Niagara Falls, Ontario. There, they produced a manifesto calling for an end to racial discrimination, full civil liberties for African-Americans and recognition of human brotherhood. The organization they established came to be called the
Niagara Movement. After the notorious
Springfield, Illinois race riot of
1908, a group of concerned
European Americans joined with the leadership of the Niagara Movement and formed the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) a year later, in
1909. Under the leadership of DuBois, the NAACP mounted legal challenges to segregation and lobbied legislatures on behalf of black Americans. During this period, African Americans continued to create independent community and institutional lives for themselves. They established schools,
churches, social welfare institutions,
banks,
newspapers and small businesses to serve the needs of their communities.
The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance
During the first half of the 20th century, the largest internal population shift in U.S. history took place. During the
Great Migration, over 5 million African Americans moved from the South to northern cities, the West and Midwest in hopes of finding better jobs and greater equality. In the 1930s, the concentration of blacks in urban areas led to the cultural movement known as the
Harlem Renaissance. Black intellectual and cultural circles were influenced by thinkers such as
Aime Cesaire and
Leopold Sedar Senghor, who celebrated blackness, or
negritude; and arts and letters flourished. Writers
Zora Neale Hurston,
Langston Hughes,
Claude McKay and
Richard Wright; and artists
Lois Mailou Jones,
William H. Johnson,
Romare Bearden,
Jacob Lawrence and
Archibald Motley gained prominence. A new generation of powerful African American political leaders and organizations also came to the fore. Membership in the NAACP rapidly increased as it mounted an anti-lynching campaign in reaction to ongoing southern white violence against blacks.
Marcus Garvey's
UNIA, the
Nation of Islam and union organizer
A. Philip Randolph's
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters all were established during this period and found support among urban African Americans.
Two World Wars
Many soldiers of color served their country with distinction during
World War I and
World War II.
Famous segregated units, such as the
Tuskegee Airmen and
U.S. 761st Tank Battalion proved their value in combat, leading to
desegregation of all US Armed Forces by order of President
Harry S. Truman in July of
1948 via
Executive Order 9981. It also opened jobs for black women in the field of nursing.
The Civil Rights Movement
Main articles: African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)
The
Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in the case of
Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka. This decision led to the dismantling of legal segregation in all areas of southern life, from schools to restaurants to public restrooms. Meanwhile,
Fannie E. Motley graduated from Spring Hill College in Mobile Alabama in 1956. The ruling also brought new momentum to the
Civil Rights Movement.
Boycotts against segregated public transportation systems sprang up in the South, the most notable of which was the
Montgomery Bus Boycott. Civil rights groups organized other boycotts, voter registration campaigns,
Freedom Rides and other nonviolent direct action, such as marches, pickets and sit-ins to mobilize around issues of equal access and voting rights. Southern segregationists fought back to block reform. The conflict grew to involve steadily escalating physical violence, bombings and intimidation; and southern law enforcement responded with batons, electric cattle prods, fire hoses, attack dogs and mass arrests.
In
Virginia, a campaign of obstructionism and outright defiance, called
Massive Resistance, entailed a series of actions by state legislators, school board members and other public officials to deny state funding to integrated schools and fund privately run "segregation academies" for white students.
Farmville, Virginia, in
Prince Edward County, was one of the plaintiff African-American communities involved in the 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision. As a last-ditch effort to avoid court-ordered desegregation, officials in the county shut down the county's entire public school system in
1959.
[1] White students were able to attend private schools established for the sole purpose of circumventing integration. The largely black, rural population of the county had little recourse. Some families were split up as parents sent their children to live with relatives in other locales to attend public school; but the majority of Prince Edward's more than 2,000 black children, as well as many poor whites, simply remained unschooled until court action forced the schools to reopen five years later.
Perhaps, the high point of the Civil Rights Movement was the
1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which brought more than 200,000 marchers to the grounds of the
Lincoln Memorial and the
National Mall in
Washington, D.C., to speak out for an end to southern racial violence and police brutality, equal opportunity in employment, equal access in education and public accommodations. The organizers of the march were the "Big Six" of the Civil Rights Movement: labor organizer and initiator of the march, A. Phillip Randolph;
Roy Wilkins of the NAACP;
Whitney Young, Jr., of the
National Urban League;
Martin Luther King, Jr., of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC);
James Farmer of the
Congress on Racial Equality (CORE); and
John Lewis of the
Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Also active behind the scenes and sharing the podium with Dr. King was
Dorothy Height, head of the
National Council of Negro Women. It was at this event, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that King delivered his historic "
I Have a Dream" speech. This march and the conditions which brought it into being are credited with putting pressure on President
John F. Kennedy and then
Lyndon B. Johnson that culminated in the passage the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions.
The "Mississippi Freedom Summer" of
1964 brought thousands of idealistic youth, black and white, to the state to run "freedom schools," to teach basic literacy, history and civics. Other volunteers were involved in voter registration drives. The season was marked by harassment, intimidation and violence directed at Civil Rights workers and their host families. The disappearance of three youths,
James Chaney,
Andrew Goodman and
Michael Schwerner in
Philadelphia, Mississippi, captured the attention of the nation. Six weeks later, searchers found the savagely beaten body of Chaney, a black man, in a muddy dam alongside the remains of his two white companions, who had been shot to death. Outrage at the escalating injustices of the "Mississippi Blood Summer," as it by then had come to be known, and at the brutality of the murders brought about the passage of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Act struck down barriers to black enfranchisement and was the capstone to more than a decade of major civil rights legislation.
By this time, African Americans who questioned the effectiveness of nonviolent protest had gained a greater voice. More militant black leaders, such as
Malcolm X of the
Nation of Islam and
Eldridge Cleaver of the
Black Panther Party, called for blacks to defend themselves, using violence, if necessary. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the
Black Power movement urged African Americans to look to Africa for inspiration and emphasized black solidarity, rather than integration.
Political and economic empowerment
Politically but less so economically, blacks have made substantial strides in the post-civil rights era. Civil rights leader
Jesse Jackson, who ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in
1984 and
1988, brought unprecedented support and leverage to blacks in politics. In
1989, Virginia became the first state in U.S. history to elect a black
Governor,
Douglas Wilder. In
1992 Carol Moseley-Braun of
Illinois became the first black woman elected to the
U.S. Senate. There were 8,936 black officeholders in the United States in
2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since
1970. In
2001 there were 484 mayors and 38 members of Congress. The
Congressional Black Caucus serves as a political bloc in Congress for issues relating to African Americans. The appointment of blacks to high federal offices—including General
Colin Powell, Chairman of the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989-1993,
United States Secretary of State,
2001 -
2005;
Condoleezza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, 2001-
2004, confirmed Secretary of State in January,
2005;
Ron Brown,
United States Secretary of Commerce,
1993-
1996; and Supreme Court justices
Thurgood Marshall and
Clarence Thomas—also demonstrates the increasing visibility of blacks in the political arena. However many African Americans are discouraged by the fact that most of the above mentioned Blacks appointed to government positions served the political party opposed by 90% of Black Americans.
Economic progress for blacks has been equally slow. According to Forbes rich lists,
Oprah Winfrey was the richest African American of the
20th century and has been the world's only
black billionaire in 2004, 2005, and 2006.
[2] Not only was Winfrey the world's only black billionaire but she's been the only black on the
Forbes 400 nearly every year since 1995 (
BET founder
Bob Johnson briefly joined her on the list from 2001-2003 before his ex-wife acquired part of his fortune, though he recently returned to the list in 2006). With only two blacks wealthy enough to rank among America's 400 richest people, blacks are currently only 0.5% of America's economic elite, despite being 12% of the U.S. population.
Historians
See also
Biography
★ Notable
★ Notable
Further reading
★ ''The African-American Odyssey'', by Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, 2nd ed.;
Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2002
★ ''Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia,'' Darlene Clark Hine, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Elsa Barkley Brown, editors; paperback edition,
Indiana University Press, 2005
★ ''Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste,'' by
Mark S. Weiner,
Alfred A. Knopf, 2004
★ ''Bridges of Memory; Chicago's First Wave of Black Migration: An Oral History,'' by Timuel D. Black Jr.,
Northwestern University Press, 2005 ISBN 0-8101-2315-0
★ ''From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans'', by
John Hope Franklin, rev. ed., Alfred Moss,
McGraw-Hill Education, 2001
★ ''Roots: 30th Anniversary Edition'', by Alex Haley,
Vanguard Press, 2007
Notes
1. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
2. African Roots of African-American Culture
3. New World Exploration and English Ambition
4. From Indentured Servitude to Racial Slavery
5. Declarations of Independence, 1770-1783
6. The Revolutionary War
7. The Constitution and the New Nation
8. Growth and Entrenchment of Slavery
9. Philadelphia
10. Freedom and Resistance
11. The Black Church
12. For the story of the lynchings, see Philip Dray, ''At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America'' (New York: Random House, 2002). For the systematic oppression and terror inflicted, see Leon F. Litwack, ''Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow'' (New York, 1998).
External links
★
"Africans in America" - PBS 4-Part Series (2007)
★
Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial Future by
Dr. Manning Marable (2006)
★
Black History Collection
★
Library of Congress - African American History and Culture
★
Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia University
★
Encyclopedia Britannica - Guide to Black History
★
Missouri State Archives - African American History Initiative
★
Black History Month
★
"Remembering Jim Crow" - Minnesota Public Radio (multi-media)
★
Educational Toys focused on African-American History developed by History in Action Toys
★
"Slavery and the Making of America" - PBS - WNET, New York (4-Part Series)
★
Timeline of Slavery in America
★
Tennessee Technological University - African-American History and Studies
★
"They Closed Our Schools," the story of Massive Resistance and the closing of the Prince Edward County, Virginia public schools
★
Return to Glory: The Powerful Stirring of the Black Man
★
"A White Man's Journey Into Black History"
★
Black People in History
★
Comparative status of African Americans in Canada in the 1800s
★
Historical resources related to African American history provided free for public use by the State Archives of Florida
★
USF Africana Project A guide to African American genealogy
★
Ancient Egyptian Photo Gallery
★
Research African American Records at the National Archives
★
Memphis Civil Rights Digital Archive
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